“The idea occurred to me that these unfortunates might have been saved could a rope have been thrown to their assistance over the fatal Chasm, a few hundred yards to the bar, and they be hauled through or over the Surf thereby,” Newell later wrote. To this end, he experimented with various projectiles — bow and arrow, rockets, an early type of shotgun and finally a carronade, a short cannon that disgorged a ball and a line to ailing ships.
But Newell would make his name not for these engineering feats. A decade later, the newly minted congressman introduced legislation to establish stations between Sandy Hook and Little Egg Harbor to aid shipwrecked mariners.
Although fellow politicians initially considered it “chimerical, expensive and useless,” he eventually managed to attach to another bill a $10,000 earmark to build boathouses and equip them with surfboats, rockets and carronades along the New Jersey coast. And thus the U.S. Life-Saving Service was born.
Never heard of it? Well, in 1915 the Life-Saving Service merged with the Revenue Cutter Service to form our modern-day Coast Guard. In the first year of the Life-Saving Service, those early “surfmen” proved their mettle by saving 201 people from the wreck of the Scottish ship Ayrshire, in part using a device reportedly perfected by Newell himself — a “breeches buoy” (picture a life preserver sewn onto a pair of shorts).
Stations quickly spread to Long Island, up and down the Atlantic and to the Texas coast, although in some cases the equipment quickly went to ruin.
In one town, the lifeboat came to be “regarded by the citizens of the town as a sort of public peregrinating makeshift . . . and made to do duty alternately as a trough for mixing mortar and a tub for scalding hogs!” The positions of surfmen, which paid $200 a year, often became pawns of political patronage — yes, even in New Jersey.
“There is now, upon the New Jersey coast, a station Captain, who never was at sea, does not know how to feather an oar, or even swim, who was retained by the Superintendent to the exclusion of more skillful men simply because of his political activity,” wrote one man after the wreck of the Metropolis off the coast of North Carolina in 1878. “On some stations, there are crews who could not row together in unison for their lives.”
Despite some disastrous wrecks in which the surfmen were either too far away or too poorly equipped to help, the U.S. Life-Saving Service grew and improved, writes Dennis R. Means in “A Heavy Sea Running: The Formation of the U.S. Life-Saving Service, 1846-1878."
The average distance between stations shrank, and administrators established storm signal stations, improved training and introduced professional standards. Between 1871 and 1915, the U.S. Life-Saving Service attended to 28,121 wrecks, saving 174,121 lives.
“Although mere cold statistics to warm and complacent Americans today,” Means writes, “such figures are indicative of a legacy of valor and skill the likes of which this country may never see again.”